Alright, as expected there isn’t much new to report. My classes have improved significantly this week as I have managed to correct some of my speaking problems. I still struggling along in this regard but I am getting better, slowly. I’ve also got to know one of my classmates (French of Chinese descent) a little better, [...]

I’ve been slacking off with keeping this up to date but it’s not too important since routine is starting to form and there is less to talk about. Saturday On Saturday I woke up at 9:35am and realized that Hanxue was meant to be here 5 minutes ago, but more importantly I needed to get ready! So [...]

21st September 2008 Thursday Thursday morning I woke up at 7:45am assuming that it’d give me enough time to get to school. Auntie (the landlady; from here on I call her Auntie in Chinese) was up and already doing stuff. I’d actually woke up a few times before that at 6:30am and then 7:15am since there [...]

20th September 2008 With the room booked, friends made and business sorted it was time to bust-a-move. Tuesday Even though I had the 4hr marathon of morning classes ahead of me, all I could think about was getting away from Lao Bao and the Old Guest House. It’s like two sides of the tunnel. On one side [...]

19th September 2008 Been a lot of exciting changes in the past week, I’ve made some new friends and moved house. Let’s go. Saturday As I was saying last time, I was planning on calling around for accomodation on Saturday. I had to return to the internet cafe first to check the dates-of-posting for the 5 apartments. [...]

School’s started so here’s the run down of the past week. On Monday morning I woke up at 6:30am and got out of bed when my phone alarm chimmed in at 7am. Have been doing this everyday since. It gives me enough time to shower, eat breakfast and get ready for the day. I then get [...]

Just posting that I have updated my flickr account with 17 new photos of the area where I live. Photostream

Hello everyone bothered enough to read through my recent far-flung account of life in China. I have another big hit of writing from the last week to post up. From here on out I needn’t offer much backstory so the articles should be easier to swallow. I will also be taking pictures next week, once [...]

A few months ago, I was practicing langage with one of my good Chinese friends. Quite often, every Thursday we’d find ourselves drilling into the misunderstandings that seperate us. We’d been doing this a lot for not quite the past year or so, with each of us kicking things off with our own observations of [...]

While the weekend period was slow, I’ve hit my stride in the past few days and feel pleased for it. Here goes: Monday I woke up at 8am on Monday morning and decided that getting out of bed earlier would help cure the weekend procrastination. It seemed pretty quiet next door, so I assumed that the Nigerean [...]

I’d better give a run down of all my progress since the previous article, hopefully I can remember all of the important stuff as it’s all starting to get a little vague. This time I will break it up again into lots of 3 days. I should also mention that writing straight to Word documents in [...]

Rounding up everything I’ve wanted to say, I just want to quickly mention how I am finding all of this. I’d say rough is probably the most appropriate word. The standard of living here is obviously lower and therefore less comfortable. My room is fine and I think that this is the important thing. I found [...]

Shanghai is about as modern as it is underdeveloped If you average out the country and city standards of living then the average standard of living is quite low Roads are filled with cars, busses, trucks, bikes, bicycles, scooters and people none of the people on the road care about anyone else Street vendors sell those zany looking [...]

I figured that I’d be pretty nosey when it came to the state that boasts-the-most-roast and asked a bunch of people about the what life is like over the border. This is all in order of happening: Friendly Passanger Some Staff at the Melbourne Airport can be extremely rude Airport Staff The Melbourne Airport is about 20-25km from the [...]

It’s been a rough slog settling in over here and will undoubtedly prove to be more so as my list of responsibilities amount, but here I am - finally in Shanghai and living on campus. This is my account of the first three days, please excuse all spelling and grammatical errors. I use a free [...]

It’s all been a bit like that hasn’t it? I haven’t posted anything on here for two months. I’ve never understood people who just leave their blogs there, lying in their audience’s wait and now I am a more than active (or is that inactive) participant. The last post, in part explains my absence. I’ve [...]

Originally written back in 23rd June 2008 Picking up from where I left off, I will be receiving my package in a weeks time, turns out my University lost my parcel because as it was sent to the Uni addressed to me which threw a spanner in their works. Pretty pathetic actually. The last 2 weeks [...]

Originally Written on 10th June 2008 Well it’s the 10th today and I am surprised that despite what I wrote in my last post I am still on the hard slog, hardly relieved from my University duties. As I said last time I had a bit of a sore throat which kept me at bay from [...]

Originally Written on Friday 30th May 2008 These last few weeks have been a hard slog. I’ve been investing a good amount of time on my studies with my usual semester intent. Every semester I try to finish most of my major assignments as early as possible leaving me with plenty of time to relax and [...]

Written on 9th May 2008 So I have been thinking about what I said before and want to provide a rider to that. I think that I should probably be putting a conscious effort into focusing on more of the course work in my Chinese study and less so on spoken language and relevant dialogue. One of [...]